Original subtitles

Ambulance, what's the emergency?

We're at Southport. OK.

The Gold Coast, where the lights burn bright

and the sunshine never ends.

While many Aussies call it home...

..every year 12 million tourists

come to play on this stretch of golden coastline.

He was surfing when he got bitten on both legs by a shark.

I don't think I'm going in the sea again.

But the good times... We need some medical staff.

..can often turn ugly... Pelvic binder on him, OK?

..and when they do... You've had a heart attack.

..these are the people you want on your side.

This is Princess Charlotte,

so we've got her a room with a view. Good.

This guy doesn't die,

there's a good chance he's gonna end up with a horrible brain injury.

Whether you are just visiting... Love you.

..or you live here...

This dude seriously got attacked by a buffalo.

She's biting me.

(GASPS)

Are we getting any sort of a blood pressure out of this?

We could still lose this leg. ..these are the real stories...

You OK? Yep.

..of the cutting edge medical teams...

Do not move your head.

We need to go in and get that caught out straight away.

Good work, guys. ..who pick you up...

OK, just keep moving.

You may get some chest pain. We're inflating the balloon now.

..patch you up...

Superpower!

The fairy dust's very magical and it fixes all sorts of things.

..and put you back in paradise.

Where else would you rather be?

Tonight on Gold Coast Medical.

The ball came through and just hit me.

An elite young sports star

faces a future without footie...

The other option is taking your eye away.

..cutting-edge surgery to save Dave's leg...

Whenever you tinker with the blood supply to the leg,

there's a chance of things going wrong.

..calls on some super-sized spare parts.

Wow!

..and eight-year-old Jack's thumb won't bend,

and his sister has had enough.

It's basically like having a two-year-old all over again.

It's time for some miracle microsurgery.

It'll be like a Spiderman scar. Oh!

♪ Catch the sun

♪ Before it's gone

♪ Here it comes

♪ Up in smoke and gone. ♪

(SIRENS BLARE)

Heart disease is Australia's biggest killer. A cardiac crisis

can happen anywhere, any time and for tens of thousands of Aussies,

their survival will depend on an effective emergency response.

What's the town or suburb of your emergency?

Ah! Oh, I'm so upset. Quickly, we're at Southport.

OK. On Southport... Now calm down for me, whereabouts in Southport?

It's at the workplace. It's the workplace.

Please call the ambulance.

The ambulance is on the way, I need you to take a breath for me

and tell me exactly what's happened.

He's blue. OK.

He's not there. He's not there.

OK, how old is he? He's about 60...

OK. Is he awake? No.

Is he breathing? No.

With no breath and no pulse, the man is minutes from death.

Inside the hospital's emergency department,

Doctor Louisa Saunders leads the team

preparing for the incoming patient.

So we've got a 60-year-old bloke

who has had a cardiac arrest.

We're gonna stabilise him, make sure he's getting properly ventilated

which may mean putting him off to sleep

putting a tube down his throat and settling up on a ventilator.

Make sure his heart keeps going and then

figure out what's going on.

The ambo has got to the man in around four minutes and were

able to get his heart going with a single shock from a defibrillator.

He's got a pulse but it's weak and it's way out of rhythm.

First name is Russell,

collapsed at work on arrival in his VF.

Shocked once at 200 with a change in rhythm.

ECG show into your lateral, semi.

The paramedics' scan of Russell's heart suggests a blockage has

cut off blood supply to part of his heart muscle.

Smoker is the only history

that we know. Right.

As soon as Russell's airway is controlled,

he's rushed to the catheter lab, where a team is

preparing to try and clear the blockage and save his life.

♪ What doesn't kill you makes you stronger

♪ Stand a little taller

♪ Doesn't mean I'm lonely when I'm alone. ♪

16-year-old Cooper is footie mad,

and so too is the rest of his family. His dad, Craig, coaches both

Cooper and his brother Logan in their local team,

the Parkwood Sharks.

OK. Bring it in, guys. Let's go.

And his older brother, Jared, plays in the NRL for the Brisbane Broncos.

♪ Stronger

♪ Stand a little taller. ♪

These days, though,

Cooper has to work extra hard keeping his eye on the ball.

You couldn't see that ball coming, that was your good side.

The hardest part is trying to catch the ball.

Six weeks ago, Cooper lost the sight in his right eye in a nasty accident

involving a golf ball at the driving range with his mates.

I was hit and then I let go of my club by accident.

I went to pick it up. I turned around

and as I turned round the ball came through and just hit me,

ruptured my eyeball. So the eye must've been open when it hit me

and then I sort of just turned around and fell on one knee,

and then got up and just asked one of the boys for a jumper

or something just to put over it,

'cause there was blood coming out everywhere.

When the call came through telling Craig that one of his sons had

been hurt playing sport, it was nothing out of the ordinary.

I just thought, you know, hit in the eye with a ball.

Broken cheekbone, whatever.

And it wasn't until the ambos actually got there that...

When one of them actually opened it I knew it was serious 'cause it

sort of gushed out with a bit of blood and so it was pretty horrific.

The impact from a golf ball driven off the tee by one

of his mates literally split Cooper's eye in half.

For four hours, surgeons tried to save the eye

but the damage was too great.

They ask you if you've got any questions but you don't know

if you've got any questions,

because you don't know what you should be asking.

To lose your sight, it's such a permanent thing.

At that stage we hadn't told him what was going on either.

So...

It's been a tough six weeks for Cooper's mum, Sharon,

who is still trying to come to terms

with what happens to her precious son.

It's about protecting him

and just making sure that he's OK and just being strong for them.

Gold Coast University Hospital is a training hospital.

Has the rehab consult gone in?

That means that working alongside the huge team of doctors

is the next generation of medical professionals.

We're unique in Australia

in the fact that we have

two medical schools that we provide

undergraduate training for.

He's doing very well, he's getting up and about.

I spend a significant amount of my time with my direct trainees,

teaching them the craft, if you like, or vascular surgery.

We also spend a fair bit time with undergraduates,

teaching them how to be doctors, and then also preparing

the brand-new doctors for perhaps specialist training later on.

As he does his rounds on the ward...

Good morning. Morning! Ah! Good morning, all.

..Doctor Will Butcher introduces his students to

a vascular surgeon's classic customer -

62-year-old bricklayer Dave.

He came into hospital a day or so ago with some black toes.

This has happened because the blood supply to his left foot

has been cut off at a couple of levels.

The onset of gangrene in his toes came as a shock to Dave.

Three weeks ago,

my foot swelled up and started

to look like what you see on the cigarette packet.

But Will has seen this problem plenty of times

in his 25 years as a surgeon.

My experience is a lot of lay people who look at those

photographs on cigarette packages kind of go, "These are dressed up,

"specifically," and you'll see

that his foot's in fact not dressed up at all.

And that is what it looks like, really.

And it's no surprise.

Probably a packet a day.

Except when I was at work,

and probably two packs, a packet and a half.

'Cause by a bridge you always got a fag in your mouth

and talking to someone

and working and a fag in your mouth again.

So... So how are you doing?

Alright. Yeah, I feel well. You all ready for this afternoon?

Evidently, yeah, I am. Yeah.

In a few hours, Doctor Butcher will try to repair the damage that

a lifetime of heavy smoking has done to Dave's arteries.

A major heart attack caused

60-year-old Russell's heart to stop beating

while he was at work.

Paramedics got it going again and raced him to Gold Coast

University Hospital, where Doctor Ravi Batra is about to investigate.

Ready for the diagnostic.

Ravi injects a dye directly

into Russell's heart that will show up any blockages on the X-ray.

It doesn't take long to find the culprit.

This is what we call as the left main artery,

which then divides into two main arteries.

If you notice here, there's an abrupt reclusion here.

There is no arteries running down that area, it's barren.

That's where it is blocked.

With part of its blood supply blocked,

Russell's heart couldn't cope.

Ravi tries to clear the blockage using a fine wire...

So be in that one? Yes, please.

..carefully fed in through the access point in Russell's groin.

Ok, good. Can I have the wire now?

So we now start to try and open that artery.

We start out by passing that wire. And by me passing down the wire,

we can see that some flow have been down that blocked artery now.

The flow has improved but the artery is not staying open.

Give me a 315 stent, please. Yes.

The stent is a mesh tube that can be fed in, compressed

and then expanded to form a scaffold inside Russell's artery.

It looks good at the spot where I put in the stent.

But there are some lesions, that's clear as well, which either are

a lesion I have missed or it is an artery which is in spasm.

The stent has worked.

But where the reinforcing stops, the artery continues to collapse.

If Ravi can't make a repair quickly, Russell will have permanent

heart damage or even lose his life.

60-year-old Russell has just suffered a major heart attack.

Doctor Ravi Batra has found the blocked artery in his heart

but there's a problem.

There are some lesions, that's clear as well, which either are

a lesion I have missed or it is an artery which is in spasm.

A section of artery right next to the blockage has now collapsed.

Ravi goes in again.

A second stent is fed all the way into the damaged blood vessel

in Russell's heart...

OK, it's going up.

..and this time the artery stays open.

The result after putting the second scan, which is a fairly good result.

Then we pull out everything, make sure the result looks good,

which it does. I'm happy with the result.

Russell's heart looks to have escaped serious damage,

but for his brain that was starved of blood for four minutes,

it could be a different story.

Open this.

Went well as far as the cardiac procedure is concerned.

What is of concern now is what neurological damage has happened

while he was in cardiac arrest.

I'm told the downtime was about four minutes.

So basically it's the neurological recovery,

we have to wait and watch now.

A week later, when Russell wakes up, he has no idea what happened.

Why are you in hospital, Russell? What happened to you?

What happened to me? Yeah.

That put you in hospital.

I think I must have collapsed somewhere or...

Such a jumbled mind.

Luckily his memory loss is just temporary but for his family

it's still a concern.

That short-term memory has gone, at the moment.

We need to get it back.

We're gonna put you in the garage and fix you up.

Yeah. (LAUGHS)

It will be a couple of weeks in a dedicated rehab

before Russell's brain bounces back.

See ya! See you, Russell.

And, miraculously, a few months later,

a fit and fully recovered Russell returned to work.

Dave has been a two-pack-a-day man

most of his life, and his black toes are

just the tip of the iceberg.

The problem with Dave's blood circulation starts

way up in his belly.

So this is an X-ray of the blood supply through

Mr Enis' abdomen to his legs and this here,

you'll see, is the main artery coming down though his tummy.

To the trained eye, it's a horrifying picture.

And you can see that that main artery is blocked completely there

and there is no artery visible here.

What you can just see are the shadows of the calcium which is

part of the stuff that's blocked the artery and we will be looking to

do a bypass from up here, using a little graft shaped like a pair

of trousers, where one of them will go down to that side

and one to this side.

What you can also see on this X-ray is on the right hand side, which is

the good leg, the artery that goes through the thigh down into

the lower leg, this artery here,

is still open but it's missing on the left and we plan to replace

that artery as well.

Thanks very much. We'll see ya, then.

Dave really has done a job on himself. Replacing nearly a metre

of artery will be major surgery.

My god.

Are you all going to be there?

Yeah, look, he's in trouble.

The truth is if he doesn't have the surgery he will lose a leg in due

course anyway so this is leg-saving surgery.

If Dave is going to make a recovery from the surgery, it's going to mean

kicking his lifelong habit.

Any operation we do for him is adversely affected by

ongoing cigarette smoking.

No, I won't be smoking again, as far as I can see.

But I say that now, who knows.

In truth, if he continues to smoke I think it may be more likely that

he will have a heart attack and that will be the cause of his death.

16-year-old Cooper's eye was split in half

by a golf ball in a freak accident at a golfing range.

Essentially, it's a bit of a bright light.

The accident has left him permanently blind in one eye and today,

he's seeing ophthalmologist Doctor Sharon Morris

to discuss the next step.

I just want to get back to doing normal stuff,

it's just more sick of it than worrying about it.

Starting to get more frustrating, I think, than... anything.

As much as I haven't got one eye, I can't do anything about it

so I'm just... what can we do to finish it?

Just so I can start playing footie.

Cooper has always dreamed of playing Rugby League at an elite level

and he's looking for the best way to get back on the field.

The two options that are available

to you are whether we keep your eye there.

We manage the comfort and the pain, eventually it will settle down.

The other option is taking your eye away

because of the extent of trauma,

we would actually have to take the muscles off the eyeball,

take away the whole eye itself, including the white coat of the eye.

Replace it with a ball implant

and cover it all over with your conjunctival tissue,

the lining tissue of your eye.

Although Cooper's eye will never work again,

removing it would be a big step.

It's a major psychological trauma and stress in terms of coping

with losing an eye.

It's a big journey. There's a lot to deal with emotionally with regards

to what it's gonna do, how it's going to affect you,

how you can do things in life,

what it means for you and it's a learning time.

Cooper's family will help him make this decision.

I'm not sure what to say about everything.

Just... I'd be happy just to do

whatever they think is best but I don't know.

But ultimately, this is one call the young fella

will have to make himself.

It's been two months since 16-year-old Cooper was hit in the eye

with a golf ball at a driving range.

The golf ball ruptured his right eyeball, leaving it permanently blind

but this levelheaded bloke won't let it get him down.

I don't get sad, I just get more annoyed at it,

that I can't do certain things.

I just take the positives out of it, as in, like,

it didn't hit me in the temple

or it didn't hit me in the back of the head.

One positive the family is taking from the accident is how it's made

Cooper and his brother, Logan, closer mates.

Me and Coop, before that accident happened,

We were brothers but we weren't friends.

This whole thing's just basically brought us together, like,

he can talk to me, I can...

Like, he's been at his friends and he's like, "Oh, I need a lift home,

"can you help us out?"

And I'll just drop everything for him.

Logan has been helping Cooper decide if it's worth keeping

the unrepairable eye, with a lifetime of upkeep to avoid infection,

or if he's better off having it removed.

Just keen to get back to normality,

just get back to everything that I used to do with mates

and footie and things.

After giving it much thought, Cooper has decided that having the eyeball

taken out is going to be the best option for him.

How are you doing? Good.

Are you feeling alright? Yeah.

Doctor Sharon Morris is going to take the eye out...

So I'm going to put an arrow on your right side.

..and replace it with an orbital implant that will get a hand-painted

iris and pupil attached that matches Cooper's good eye.

Make sure we've got everything here, make you comfortable as possible.

Once Cooper's parents have wished him luck, the team take him into

the operating theatre,

put him to sleep and prepare to permanently remove the eye.

Mum!

Life is pretty sweet if you're a kid growing up on the Gold Coast.

Oh, bad luck!

Take eight-year-old Jack. He doesn't seem to have a care in the world.

Should do your shoelaces up a bit tighter.

Except maybe that he still needs his mum to tie his shoelaces for him

but there's a special reason for that,

and that's something they're hoping Professor Randy Bindra

will be able to fix. Very good, thank you.

Nice to meet you, Doctor. Good to see you.

And you must be Jack? This is Jack.

How are you buddy? Good to see you. Good.

So heard you injured your thumb. Is that right? What happened?

Yeah. I was riding my bike with a glass jar.

A bike with a glass jar. That's pretty cool.

And I... Like this?

No. Like that?

No. Yeah, and I fell off and there was a big bit of glass sticking out.

Oh, boy. And it went in.

And we had X-rays and all the nerves and everything

were in place.

Excellent, everything was in place. But you can't move it very well?

I can't bend it.

How long ago did this happen? He was six when that happened.

At the time, it was just another misadventure boys get themselves

into, so Jack's mum, Elissa, didn't think too much of it.

There's where we had the glass

go in there and then... Try bending.

It goes straight.

He goes across, go to this and this side.

Now go like this.

Yeah... See, no. We get nothing.

I will say it and you write it down.

OK. You ready? Yep.

Call.

When it started to affect his schoolwork, Jack did eventually

pipe up that something didn't feel quite right.

I was writing and then I needed a rubber 'cause I made a mistake

and I rubbed it and I couldn't feel my thumb

and then I went and told Mum.

It was a surprise to me because I just thought he was going

along normally.

Now, I don't want to hurt you,

so I'm just going to be very gentle with this part.

Does that bother you?

No, but as you go down it hurts. As I go further it could hurt?

Yeah. Got ya. OK.

Having been turned away by numerous other doctors, saying they either

couldn't see a problem or couldn't fix it, Professor Bindra

is their last hope. OK?

After a lifetime of heavy smoking, 62-year-old Dave is starting

to get gangrene in his toes because of blockages in his arteries.

This guy, there's a particular problem because he's got a blockage

at two levels.

Whenever you tinker with a blood supply to the leg,

there's a chance of things going wrong

and when things go wrong patients can lose their leg.

Are you guys ready? Yeah.

Are you ready, Andrew?

Fixing a double blockage like this is not only incredibly risky,

it's also highly unusual,

and Doctor Will Butcher is taking the opportunity to teach the procedure

to his senior trainee, Keegan.

The training programme is five years

so he's got another 3.5 years to go.

OK, so now you probably don't need much more than from here to there.

When I started 20-something years ago,

the training and surgery, it was very daunting. Very frightening.

You spend a lot of time looking to your consultant bosses

and your trainers and wondering if you will ever get there...

What you're doing, that's the proper sound.

Yeah.

..and the growth is almost imperceptible.

You can't feel yourself getting stronger or better

or more capable but you discover that

gradually the skills are acquired and you start

to be able to manage better.

In Dave's belly, Doctor Butcher's worst fears are confirmed -

the main artery taking blood down

from his heart to both legs is totally blocked.

The main artery coming down to his legs,

so we're going to put the clamp on up here

and then I'm gonna clean this section out to put the graft on.

OK? Then we'll tunnel the graft down to the groin.

Off you go, Keegan.

With a tunnel in each leg ready to get the replacement artery,

Will removes the source of Dave's problems,

a massive blood clot that so easily could have killed him.

This is the cork we've taken out of the aorta,

that's just all blood clot.

We call that 'atheroma'

and it's mostly made up of scar tissue that forms in the artery,

as a response to injury and in this case

injury would be cigarette smoking.

It's mostly just damaged cells and cholesterol and some calcification.

And if you look into the abdominal cavity,

you can see where I've opened up that artery and cleared it out.

So now we're gonna stitch our graft onto here

and then run it down to the groin.

Incredibly, the blood supply to Dave's legs now rely permanently

on a man-made spare part.

So this is the graft.

So it's a fabric called Dacron. This is made in a factory in Scotland.

The graft must be perfectly attached to the big artery.

But there's no room for error, because it came undone

Dave wouldn't survive.

This is quite tricky. Mmm.

Ophthalmologist Sharon Morris is about to remove

16-year-old Cooper's eyeball to make way for a prosthetic implant.

First step is, basically,

lots of anaesthetic around the eye socket

and then creating lots of anaesthetic underneath,

the conjunctiva because this conjunctiva

is what we need to preserve.

The last six weeks have been a tough blow for the champion sportsman,

whose eyeball was split in half in a freak golfing accident

that has left him completely blind in one eye.

The four main muscles that move the eye up, down, left and right

are carefully detached so they can be reattached to the implant.

The optic nerve is cut and the eyeball is lifted out.

All right.

The ball implant has got a coating round it.

We're using a specially-made bioceramic ball implant,

where the white will wrap. Comes pre-made and allows me to suture

the muscles directly onto the wrap. Can come out now.

Sits beautifully in there.

Tying muscles on now.

Sharon connects the four muscles to the implant.

And what we are going to do now is place a conformer shell

in over the top of that to help the lid stay formed.

So... put it in now.

For the next six to eight weeks,

those lids will be very slightly open because of the conformer.

And they'll see the clear plastic

that'll form a shell there with the holes in.

It may be unusual looking but the conformer is making room

for a realistic iris that will move in sync with Cooper's good eye

when this process is all over.

Doctor Will Butcher and his senior trainee, Keegan, have just removed

a massive killer clot from Dave's belly formed after

years of smoking. Look how nice that is.

Keegan. This looks pretty good.

There's the artery with the graft attached to it now.

Cool and now we're just gonna run those to the binds.

His main artery was so blocked, it's replaced with a synthetic one.

It's a delicate procedure as there are other blocked veins

which also need to be repaired and replaced.

That's our vein that we're gonna do the graft with.

So we have got to a point now where we have done

all of the top bit and we just need

to join that on down there.

Slowly.

Now.

And there it is, down where we need it.

Once all the new veins are in place, Will sets Keegan the challenge of

making the final link in the new blood supply to Dave's lower leg.

You and Gabby do that and estenosis,

Ku, come round here and do this

and, Andrea, can you help me close the tummy?

It's taken nearly four hours to create the double artery bypass.

The big question now is, when they take off the clamps,

will the veins hold and will blood come back into Dave's foot.

Eight-year-old Jack can't bend his thumb

and Professor Randy Bindra is trying to find out why.

I don't want to hurt you so I'm just gonna be very gentle with this part.

Does that bother you?

No, but as you go down it hurts. As I go further, it could hurt.

Yeah. Got you. OK.

Professor Bindra suspects that because the accident happened over

a year ago, the tendon has shrunk back all the way from Jack's thumb

into his wrist. Keep nice and still there.

A simple X-ray will show Randy what's going on.

So what the report is saying is what I suspected,

that the tendon is completely ruptured.

So there's the thumb bone right there. OK.

Imagine the thumb lying this, OK? Yeah.

So here's a thumb. And normally there should be a tendon in there.

OK? And the tendon usually appears like a black shadow in there.

Surgery is needed, absolutely. Yes. Yeah.

Does it have to get cut?

Yeah, I'll give you a nice, cool scar.

Oh!

It'll be like a Spiderman scar, you can shoot webs from that.

Surgery to repair the tendon will mean a few weeks with his right hand

out of action, but Jack is focusing on the positives.

I can get a week off school. Fingers crossed.

Well, all fingers, just not his thumb.

So today Professor Randy Bindra will try and return movement

to the tip of Jack's thumb with a tendon repair.

Normally repairing a tendon is straightforward,

because when you cut a tendon you find the two ends and repair it.

What happened in Jack's case is he cut it about 18 months ago.

We don't have a good idea of the condition of the tendon,

whether it'll be tight, because naturally muscles tighten.

As they are cut and so it may be quite shrunk down.

We may not be able to reach it through.

So that pathway could be shut down.

So right now, I don't know.

Randy is hoping for the best, but time will tell.

Because of a massive clot in his veins caused by a lifetime

of smoking, Dave's legs have been starved of blood.

His toes literally turned black.

After four hours of painstaking surgery to remove clots

and repair veins,

the moment has come for Will and his trainee, Keegan, to see

if the operation has been a success.

That's good, that's low resistance.

I'm happy with that.

Thank you. That sounds good.

Keegan, you can stop looking at it now and put it away.

It's the greatest thing as a surgeon to watch somebody

you've trained turn into a good surgeon.

Replacing two sections of blocked artery has returned good blood flow

to Dave's lower leg and the improvement is instant.

So now it's nicer feet.

Look at that.

Now it's time to warm up, already.

But if Dave is going to get back on his feet,

the lifelong smoker will have to kick his pack-a-day habit.

You'd think that an operation like this might frighten them

into doing it, it's not always true.

But you've got to give it up right now. Packet of cigarettes now cost,

what, close to 30 bucks? Some of these guys are smoking more

than a packet a day. That's a lot of money.

Holy mackerel. Wow!

I get to venture outside? You do, into the outside world.

Oh. Alright.

A few days later, the foot is on the way to making a full recovery from

the early stages of gangrene and Dave has got his plan in place

to stay off the smokes.

I think I can beat it.

It's the best chance I've got. It's the first time I've had a real good

chance of stopping, so,

I'll be determined to stop.

And I've got my mates who will have a go at me if I try and pick one up,

so that's the main thing.

Just try and slow your breathing down a little bit there.

Take nice, slow, deep breaths.

It he doesn't give up smoking and he doesn't reform his life,

we've, in some ways, we've failed

because we've failed to take the opportunity to help him to reform

his lifestyle and look after himself a little bit better.

But he's a pretty good guy,

I think he's changeable. I think he will come good.

I can feel it getting better, everything's getting better,

quicker, each day.

I might be up roller skating by

the end of the weekend. (LAUGHS)

Break a leg. (LAUGHS)

Eight-year-old Jack is having surgery on his thumb

so he will be able to bend it...

He's putting himself to sleep, huh?

..but when Randy opens up the hand and goes looking

for the ends of the severed tendon, there's bad news.

Normally there were tendons sitting there, this looks hollow and flat.

So we expect the tendon to be normally right here,

right in the middle there, and I don't see

any tendon so obviously the tendon has retracted even at the other end,

which is not usual.

He's very scarred all the way down to the end there.

The two loose ends of the tendon have shrivelled out of sight,

and the area where they should be joined is full of scar tissue

from the glass cut injury.

There we go.

We've finally found a normal piece of tendon, but way down there,

so obviously both ends of the tendon shrivel away quite a lot.

So all I have here is a little bit of tendon, you see it?

I'm onto that with my hook. So there's the end.

Great. So he's shot up all the way up to there from here.

So it has really shrivelled down quite a lot.

Now what we want to do is find the other end of the tendon here

and make a passageway.

Randy is planning to use a piece of spare tendon from Jack's forearm

to rejoin the separate ends of the thumb flexor.

So this is his tendon back here and then I pull on it.

What it's doing is pulling on his muscles

and making the thumb twitch like that,

but it's not really reaching to the end of his thumb. OK.

The separate ends have been found but they can't be joined today.

Because my concern is, he has got too much scar tissue

and if I take his free tendon today and put it in,

it's just gonna get wrapped up in the scar.

So I'd be better off if I put the plastic rod in there and come back

a couple of months later and then take out the rod.

By then he'll have a smooth passageway

so the new tendon will glide easier.

So I'm trying to slide this in so that it goes nice and smooth

without any, as they say in Australia, without any drama.

Those two. There we are.

The silicon rod will be stitched in place and left for a few months,

then replaced with a section of Jack's own spare tendon.

Think that's a good length.

That's the problem... (LAUGHTER)

It'd have been nice if you could get it all done in one go, right?

That way Jack doesn't need two anaesthetics.

But it was definitely not worth progressing.

I think if we did it all in one stage and if it got stuck down

he wouldn't have got a good outcome.

Unfortunately, Jack will have to stay off the soccer field

for longer than he thought,

but the end result will be worth it.

It's gonna take a little bit longer but we'll get there.

Six-year-old Jack has had two operations on his right hand

to repair the flexor tendon in his thumb.

The first procedure found the two ends of the tendon he severed on

broken glass and left a plastic rod forming a space between them.

A month ago, the second operation reconnected the tendon.

We took a spare tendon from the back of the index finger and we took out

the plastic rod and we put this tendon in that space.

I haven't seen Jack since the surgery

so I'm quite excited to see what the outcome is.

Not having the use of his right hand

for two months has been hard for Jack,

not to mention his big sister Charlotte, too.

It's basically like having a two-year-old all over again.

Can't do anything. It's hard for him to hold like a fork and eat with

his left and right.

He can't do things that an everyday boy can do.

So you've been good about your splint?

Yeah. No messing around.

Was he good, was he wearing it the whole time?

You can tell on him. Not all times.

Not all times? No.

That doesn't sound good.

Let's take a look.

All right. Good.

Go ahead and try and bend it for me like this. Show me what he can do.

Very good. And do this for me, give me the perfect sign.

That's really good there.

Perfect. Perfect.

Great job. Excellent.

Now... So the good news is this is working.

Working. Right.

We want to improve the range of motion, we want to improve

the mobility and at one month, this is good for one month. OK?

Now we want to try to increase the movement in it and that will happen

over the next two months and that's when we'll increase the strength.

A couple of months of physiotherapy under the watchful eye of big sis

and Jack's thumb will be almost good as new.

I'm just pleased that it works so he can do things again.

Thank you, Professor. Oh, my pleasure.

My pleasure. OK.

See you guys. See you. Another one.

Alright.

Great stuff, thank you.

I'm mostly looking forward

to play football.

Surfing in summer.

And surfing in summer.

Bye. Bye.

And it won't be long before Jack can declare thumby wars again.

..three, four, I declare a thumb war.

It's eye replacement day for 16-year-old Cooper,

whose right eye was split in half in a freak golfing accident.

Is it weeping? No, it's all good.

It's been a tough time for the champion sportsman,

whose budding footie career has been on hold.

Just keen to get back to normality and everything like that.

Just get back to everything that I used to do with mates

and footie and things.

Ocularist Trevor Dorahy has been hand making a prosthetic that will fit

into the orbital implant already in Cooper's socket.

Everybody's iris is

a different diameter.

What I need to do is turn a button

down to the same diameter as their iris

so I can paint the colour onto it.

That then will be put into a mould like this

and I pack that with acrylic.

And the coloured iris button is covered with the white of the eye.

Now what I will do is cut that white off.

A great result at the end of it.

We get a lot more movement because the eye's really light.

It's not a solid eye.

Good morning, Cooper. Come on in.

After the trauma of the accident and having his eyeball removed,

today Cooper's life can get back to normal.

A big day. Yeah.

When you go to put that in, that pointed part goes towards your nose.

How's it feel? Cold?

Yeah, it's a bit cold at the moment

but it feels heaps better than

what I had in there before. OK, that's good.

Cooper's eye muscles that were reattached to the implant base

gives the fake iris almost as much movement as his real one.

I want you to hold your head perfectly still

and I want you to roll your eyes to the wall.

Back.

Up. And now we want it down.

Very good. I'm happy with that.

You'll find the movement will get even better than that,

it'll take a couple of weeks but it'll be quite good.

Would you like have a look at it?

It's hectic as.

"Hectic as" is not how Coop's mum, Sharon, describes it.

He looks fantastic. Looks fantastic.

We just think it looks amazing.

Facial features, you know,

you just sort of....

Back to normal. Yeah.

Good luck with it. It's really nice.

OK. Thanks, mate.

Cheers for that. OK.

And for this footie family, that means Cooper's back on the field.

He's handled everything amazingly.

He's just never let it get in his way, he's never let it get him down.

I think it'll be the final chapter of all the medical

side of things but obviously a new beginning for him.

We're just really excited to see the old Coop back.

Next week on Gold Coast Medical, top surgeons take on a challenge...

We often do cases together.

It's a concert.

It's a concert without a conductor,

right? Yeah. (LAUGHS)

..to perform a life changing miracle on this gentle giant.

A police officer watches over surgery to see what this man

has inside his body...

OK, I need whoever took the bullet out to actually give it

to the policeman in a pot as chain of evidence.

Good. ..and a new life...

You want me to catch it?

..that doesn't start as planned.

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